Sepp Blatter, who has been Fifa president since June 1998, can run for a fifth term in the position. Photograph: Stuart Franklin - Fifa/FIFA via Getty Images

Fifa has voted down attempts to consider age and term limits for its executives, in a move that could allow Sepp Blatter to continue as president indefinitely. The referendum required a simple majority to take the proposals forward to next year’s Fifa congress, where they would have needed the backing of 75% of members to be adopted.

Both were rejected out of hand, meaning the 78-year-old – preparing to stand in 2015 for another term despite earlier promising this would be his last – could theoretically carry on forever. The introduction of age or term limits was one of seven outstanding reforms listed by the former chairman of Fifa’s independent governance committee, Mark Pieth, when it was disbanded.

The Fifa chief ethics investigator looking into the controversial bidding process for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, meanwhile, has insisted he had access to the “vast majority” of the documents relied on by the Sunday Times for its recent Qatar 2022 allegations for “some time”.

The former New York attorney Michael Garcia completed his investigation into allegations of bribery and corruption surrounding the bid race on Monday and will deliver his conclusions in mid-July. “No one should assume what information we have or do not have. We have reviewed the recent reports and all the documents referenced and attached to the reports,” he told Fifa’s congress in São Paulo.

“The vast majority has been available to us for some time, since well before the recent wave of news reports. That material was being and will continue to be examined and reviewed.”

Fifa insiders believe the claims regarding payments by the former Fifa executive committee member Mohamed bin Hammam are based on the source documents for PriceWaterhouseCoopers’ investigation into the Asian Football Confederation’s accounts. Sunday Times insiders insist the paper has information he has not considered and believes his offer to consider its cache of documents is insincere given his timescale.

After Garcia delivers his conclusions to the adjudicatory chamber of the ethics committee, its chair Joachim Eckert is expected to publish the report in September or October. The most likely outcome is that Garcia, who has travelled the world to meet representatives of all the bidders and all the executive committee members still active in football and reviewed “tens of thousands” of documents, will find cause for concern with the process and the behaviour of all bidders, but no smoking gun to prove bribery.

The Qatar organising committee continues to insist that Bin Hammam played no “official or unofficial role” in its bid. “We have gone to what appears to us to be the original source of that data and we are confident we will have full access to everything in that data set,” Garcia said.

“What we cannot do, and will not do, is postpone our work indefinitely on the basis someone, somewhere might publish something we have not seen yet. We will follow our process.”

Garcia also reiterated that all football officials were required to speak to him or his team. That raises the possibility that Franz Beckenbauer – the German former Fifa executive committee member who has refused to speak to him – could face a penalty.

Blatter used the congress to launch his campaign to run for another term by joking he would expand its mission to other planets. As he said that the organisation would become “one of today’s pioneers of hope”, in London the former FA chairman Lord Triesman joined the criticism of world football’s governing body. “Fifa, I’m afraid, behaves like a mafia family. It has a decades-long tradition of bribes, bungs and corruption. About half of its executive committee that voted on the last World Cup have had to go,” he told the House of Lords.

Despite a series of senior figures in European football calling on Blatter to stand down and continuing corruption allegations, a confident president did not limit his ambitions to Earth. “We shall wonder if one day our game is played on another planet? Why not? Then we will have not only a World Cup, we will have interplanetary competitions. Why not?”

There was no mention of the more pressing controversy surrounding the Qatar 2022 World Cup that have caused concern from sponsors, the media and politicians. Instead, Blatter delivered a familiar series of platitudes, highlighting football’s popularity around the world and insisting Fifa could act as a force for good. “We must carry that flame of honesty, responsibility and always of respect. If not, we will betray the spirit of this game we love.”

In another familiar move, Blatter said that each of the 209 Fifa members would receive a $750,000 bonus payment and each confederation would get $7m.

The FA chairman Greg Dyke on Tuesday slammed the “totally unacceptable” suggestion that allegations regarding Qatar’s World Cup bid were racist, but the Congolese FA took to the podium to again denounce the claims as “racist” and “ignorant”.

Uefa delegates have called for Blatter to stand down and keep a promise he made in 2011 to make this his final term. With the Uefa president Michel Platini increasingly unlikely to take on Blatter, the search has begun for a consensus candidate who could challenge him.